Thursday, November 22, 2012

Leo Casey, UFT vice president for
academic high schools, will succeed Eugenia Kemble as executive director
of the Albert Shanker Institute, effective this fall.

“You want me to teach this stuff, but
I don’t have the stuff to teach.” So opens “Lost at Sea: New Teachers’
Experiences with Curriculum and Assessment,” a 2002 paper by Harvard University researchers about
the plight of new teachers trying to learn the craft of teaching in the face of
insubstantial curriculum frameworks and inadequate instructional materials.

David Kauffman, Susan Moore Johnson
and colleagues interviewed a diverse collection of first- and second-year
teachers in Massachusetts who reported that, despite state academic standards
widely acknowledged to be some of the best in the country, they received
“little or no guidance about what to teach or how to teach it. Left to their
own devices they struggled day to day to prepare content and materials. The
standards and accountability environment created a sense of urgency for these
teachers but did not provide them with the support they needed.”

I found myself thinking about this
recently when I realized that, with the advent of the Common Core State
Standards, new teachers won’t be the only ones in this boat. Much of the
country is on a fast-track toward implementation, but with little thought about
how to provide teachers with the “stuff” – aligned professional development,
curriculum frameworks, model lesson plans, quality student materials, formative
assessments, and so on – that they will need to implement the standards well.

Many veteran educators will make do
by stitching together tried and true lessons in new and different ways. Others
will be scrambling to find quality materials with which to plug holes, as well
as rethinking approaches to old content in order to meet new learning
objectives. And many, as the article says, will be “lost at sea.”

Kara Moloney over at “pedagogical ruckus” put it like this: “Is it
realistic to expect teachers – many of whom work second or third jobs to pay
their bills – to adequately identify students’ needs; implement multiple
assessment measures; plan instruction; reflect on their practice; provide
intervention where needed; AND successfully move students toward career- or
college-readiness without providing them the time and resources?”

Good question.

As is to be expected these days,
several for-profit organizations are eager to fill the breach. Almost
everything published since the McGuffey
reader has been declared “aligned” with the common core standards,
while expensive new material is being churned out at a furious pace. For
example, Pearson, one of the nation’s largest textbook publishers, is preparing
a soup-to-nuts array of services and materials it advertises as “aligned” to
the Common Core. According to one article, “materials will be delivered
completely online, through devices like the iPad. They will include projects
for students to complete, texts and digital materials to support students in
conducting projects, and assessments to check student understanding.”

Not having seen these materials, I
have no idea if they are any good or are worth the price, especially at a time
of severe fiscal austerity. But Pearson’s production of the New York English
Language Arts exam with its now-infamous “pineapples don’t have sleeves” question has
left the educator in me deeply skeptical about the quality of their products –
all the more so since we now know that before they became notorious in New
York, Pearson used these questions again and again in the tests of other
states, leaving a trail of complaints across the country. There is a moral to
that escapade, on what happens when corporations focused on making profits are
given control of vital pieces of our educational work.

There is an alternative to turning
over to for profit enterprises the production of the resources and supports
teachers need to improve classroom instruction and to implement the Common
Core. A new effort, launched by the AFT and the UK’s TES Connect, has the
capacity to provide far more of the quality assistance teachers need than could
ever be delivered by any state, district, or commercial publisher. It’s called
“Share My
Lesson” and is a free digital platform for U.S. educators to collaborate
with each other and share teaching resources, with a significant emphasis on
materials to guide teachers in implementing the new Common Core State
Standards.

TES already provides the world’s
largest online teacher network, with more than two million members in nations
around the world and access to over 400,000 resources. This new collaboration
has the potential to be the go-to source for American teachers, and not just
for a plethora of free materials, but also for honest feedback and ratings
about what works and why.

The power of Share My Lesson lies in
its reliance upon the collective professional knowledge and expertise of
American teachers. At a time when attacks on the professional autonomy and
authority of teachers seem to come from every side, it provides us with a
formidable tool to secure our craft and to advance the quality of our work. It
taps into the deep wellspring of teacher creativity and skill, and draws upon
our ethic of professional dialogue and collaboration. It allows us to take emerging
technology, which the foes of our profession would use to replace teachers in a grim educational
dystopia, and use it to establish an unprecedented network of professional
communication and sharing among American teachers. It gives us an effective
vehicle to demonstrate that the best work in education comes out of the
dedication of teachers to the common good of our students and our schools, and
not from the work of those that seek to make a private profit off of an
essential public service.

A cooperative venture on this immense
scale ultimately depends upon the individual contributions of thousands: Share
My Lesson will only be as good as we collectively make it. It will be important
for us to not just upload lessons and other materials, but also to provide
feedback and ratings on what has been published on the site, so that teacher
authors can improve their published work and teacher users can quickly locate
the highest quality materials. We will need, quite literally, to share our
lessons.

- Leo Casey

For lesson plan ideas and history see the Chicano/Mexican
American Digital History project. Here.
https://sites.google.com/site/democracyandeducationorg/chicano-mexican-american-digital-history-project